The trajectory is clear from historical precedent. The Apple App Store in 2010 had 20 outstanding apps. Then 200 good ones. As development costs plummeted due to better tools and infrastructure, an explosion of low-quality apps buried everything useful — 200 games about popping pimples, 20 million disposable novelties, an ocean of junk that made the storefront worthless for discovery.
Apply this pattern to everything AI can generate. Stories, news articles, academic papers, software, music, videos, legal documents, medical advice, product reviews, social media posts — all of it can be produced at near-zero cost by anyone with access to public AI. The result is an information environment so saturated with low-quality, derivative, AI-generated content that the signal-to-noise ratio approaches zero.
In the Sprawl, the "Slop Cannon" is both a pejorative and a technical term. Any entity — individual, corporate, governmental — can flood any channel with unlimited synthetic content. This has destroyed most forms of organic discovery. Search is useless (everything is SEO-optimized slop). Reviews are useless (all synthetic). News is useless (covered under propaganda theme). Creative media is buried under an infinite pile of procedurally generated garbage.
What survives? Curation becomes the most valuable skill. Trusted curators — human or verified-AI with transparent methodologies — become gatekeepers of quality. "Handmade" and "human-verified" become luxury labels. Underground networks share content through invitation-only channels with strict quality gates. The public internet is effectively abandoned by anyone who values their time, becoming a wasteland navigated only by bots talking to other bots.